


The Smart Bet

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, First Meetings, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 20:40:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6722596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miles is a soldier and a pragmatist – not a gambler, not a dreamer, not a fool.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smart Bet

**Author's Note:**

> A ~~super late~~ birthday present for the [captain](http://phindus.tumblr.com) of this beautiful ship. ♥
> 
> Extra mega shout-out to the Tumblplace anon who gave me [the perfect opportunity](http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc157/tierfal/heimiles%20soulmates_zps2ew92oid.png). \o/
> 
> ~~…this needs a sequel doesn't it.~~

People don’t usually ask questions—and when they do, they rarely ask the right ones.

Predominantly, people just accept the fact that Miles’s facility for languages has turned out to be an advantage in his career—mostly, they assume he thought it out from the beginning.  They assume he looked ahead to conflict-resolution and diplomacy and negotiations, and he deliberately positioned himself to be indispensable.

When they do ask, they ask _Where did you get your training?_ , and they offer small, admiring nods when he tells them he taught himself.

They don’t ask _Why did you start?_ , because the course of his life has provided a plausible answer.

So he’s never had to draw back his sleeve and show someone the mark.

Perhaps that’s for the best, anyway.

Perhaps it’s nothing after all, despite the fact that in small ways it’s guided the whole trajectory of his life.

Perhaps it’s best that he’s mostly given up hoping.

General Armstrong has taught him a lot of things, and one of the keenest lessons in her repertoire is that hope is for fools—victors rely on actions alone.  Ideas don’t win battles; pining drains out energy that could be used to fight.

Besides, most of the old stories lie.  The smart bet is that this one lied, too.  He can give up believing in the little fairy tales while still being grateful that this one, in a roundabout way, has enriched his entire military career by turning him into a polyglot.

It’s probably just a phenotypic fluke, in any case—an accident of nature; a haphazard happenstance of pigmentation like the too-pale hair and the too-red eyes that made it just that much more critical for him to prove his utility past a shadow of a doubt.  It’s probably just a coincidental birthmark that his brain has crafted into letters after years and years of staring at his own skin, wishing for an easy way out of the freezing isolation.  It’s probably just the universe’s private joke at his expense—one that’s kept the world laughing since the day that he tugged his sleeve down over his forearm and took a guide to learning Cretan out of the library.

It’s been a long time, after all.  And he hasn’t found it.  The smart bet is that it doesn’t exist.

The smart bet is that today is going to be another day of telling silence, like every day before it; the smart bet is that the boy who turned up in the snow speaks an uncommon dialect of Drachman, and everyone involved has exaggerated the details out of sheer boredom.  Some sort of mystical visitor from an unknown land, appearing from the ether hours before a blizzard, is a much more exciting prospect than a very lost kid whose pronunciations hail from further north than anyone at Briggs is used to.

Miles doesn’t believe in fairy tales anymore.

If he did, he’d run a fingertip along the slightly arced line of the five letters inked along the inside of his arm—cleaner and starker after thirty years than any artificial tattoo could aspire to, with the bubbled ridges of his veins playing underneath.

If he did, he’d hold his breath before he pushes through the door to the interrogation room where they’ve been waiting for him.

If he did, he’d let himself savor the softly-rising gasp of adrenaline his animal brain sends out; he’d let himself acknowledge the skitter of his heartbeat when his shaded eyes fix on the pair across the table—a pair that have gone extremely wide; a pair that are light in color and filled with a sort of desperation far too weary to qualify as fear.

Miles removes the glasses, folds their temples, and slips them into his breast pocket.  The boy’s eyes are a startlingly bright turquoise-blue—a gemstone color; summer sky and coastal water on distant shores that Miles can barely remember, if they ever existed at all.

He turns to the soldiers sitting at the far end of the table, tapping their pencils on their notebooks and looking at him with a combination of chagrin and relief.  Military interrogators are a dime a dozen, even up here.

“What have you tried?” Miles asks.

“Basic Drachman,” the lieutenant says.  “Every kind of Amestrian we could think of.”

“Yelling,” the warrant officer says helpfully, and the lieutenant glares at him.

That one must be new.  He hasn’t learned yet that a sense of humor’s liable to get you killed.

“Any regional variations?” Miles asks, despite the fact that he knows the answer before they shake their heads.  Everyone conveniently forgets the fact that Drachma’s several times the size of Amestris—and look at how many accents they’ve fostered inside their borders.  Look at how many ancient tongues they’ve burned out in the name of unification, whether or not they ever quite stopped twisting letters just a touch.

Miles explained his perspective to General Armstrong once—the imperative to _know your enemy_ is much more than just a game of chess.  Guessing at his strategy is one thing, but to know his _feelings_ —that’s where the power is; not just in predicting what he’ll do, but in knowing who he _is_.  That requires awareness of his culture; of his conventions; of his politics and his religion and his history.  And you can detect a great deal of that in the patterns of his language if you listen close enough.

Miles turns to the boy behind the table.  Someone charitably mentioned that this particular stranded specimen was brought in by Major Armstrong, which at least explains the comically oversized wool sweater draping from his frame.  Miles has never seen eyes this color of blue—though he supposes the boy’s probably never seen ones that are red, so that seems fair, doesn’t it?

He starts with the southern tundra dialect, to the best of his ability; in this climate, no solitary traveler could range much further than that.

“ _Do you understand me_?” he asks.

The boy looks at him—and the bright blue eyes stay plaintive, but there’s no comprehension there.

“ _Bitte_ ,” he says.

Miles—

Listens—

To the faint, huffed sigh that leaves the lieutenant; to the scrape of a pencil tip across the page; to the slow, slamming beat of his own heart in his ears.

“What?” he says, as though he could possibly mistake it.

As though he could possibly not have heard it—two syllables and a lifetime of fruitless searching; three decades of poring over records and squinting down at scribbled writing; years on years of forming silent sounds with his lips while the endless lines of text yielded up everything but the one word that he sought—

As though he could possibly not recognize the five letters carved like a firebrand, throbbing like an open wound, on the inside of his own fucking wrist.

The boy shifts in his chair, takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly.  He looks down at the tabletop, and then back up at Miles, and shakes his head.

The room is too small to contain this—any room would be; any place at all; a vast expanse of open fields or unmarred snow beneath a sky the color of those eyes—

Numbly, distantly, Miles registers that the air he’s pulling into his lungs is cold.  Numbly, distantly, he recalls that there are two officers of the Amestrian military watching him, and that General Armstrong will hear about it if he doesn’t reestablish self-control.

But the only other time a single word has mattered quite like this was the first time that he swept his fingertips across his mother’s notes.  She’d penned hundreds of additions in the margins of the only book he’s carried with him all this time—the only possession that he keeps under lock and key.

The only other time a single word has mattered quite like this was the day he learned the old Ishvalan word for _home_.

The boy pushes one pale hand back through his hair and hunches his shoulders; the sweater somehow dwarfs him even more.  He mumbles something else, looks over at the unimpressed interrogators, and then turns back to Miles.

“ _Bitte_ ,” he says again, and Miles tries to shake himself awake.  “ _Ich verstehe nicht_.”

The lieutenant tosses his pen down.  “Here we go again.  Where the hell is he from?”

“Hard to say,” Miles says.  “That’s not a language anyone has ever spoken on this side of Xing.”

The interrogators exchange glances.

“Are you sure?” the warrant officer asks.

“Trust me,” Miles says.  “I’ve checked.”

Miles does not believe in fairy tales.  He does not believe in miracles.  And he does not believe in soulmates.

But evidently they believe in him.


End file.
